Living In Your Head Is Exhausting
One thing that is pretty clear to me is that most of my clients don’t need more insight.
They’re already very good at analysing themselves.
What they don’t know how to do is live anywhere other than their head.
On paper, things look fine:
- work gets done
- people are supported
- life looks “normal enough”
But inside, there’s a constant stream of commentary:
- “What does this mean?”
- “Why am I like this?”
- “What if this goes wrong?”
The mind is always “on”, always scanning, always trying to manage how they feel. Clever and well-intentioned – but exhausting.
Recently, two clients wrote to me about what changed when they stopped trying to sort everything out in their heads and started to live more through the body. With their permission (lightly edited), I want to share some of what they said.
“It’s like I’m Player One now”
The first client wrote:
“Hello, I’ve been good. It feels like I’m finally living through my body. Everything I do has a different outcome.
You used to talk about ‘experience’ — I swear you said that word a million times to me — and now I actually get it. It’s like I’m Player One in a simulation and everything is fine. It’s a strange, almost alien feeling, but for the first time it genuinely feels like I exist.
I did notice myself slip back into my old way of being after an overly boring day at work (back into my head), but as soon as I clocked it, it disappeared.
I’m seeing a physio and working with my body to release the tightness. When he opened up my back and hips, it felt like more of the mind dropped away. There’s less constant narrative now — more direct experience — and I’m feeling a much wider range of emotions than before.”
Nothing spectacular has happened in his external life. Same job, same environment.
What’s changed is where he’s meeting his experience from.
The old pattern looked something like:
sensation → panic → story → analysis → more tension
The new pattern is closer to:
sensation – acknowledge – allow – create space – soften
Exactly the same triggers can show up, but his system is relating to them differently. Less managing, more meeting what’s actually here.
“It’s like a life force that wants to move”
The second client described something similar, coming more from the emotional side:
“I’ve realised there are things I can change in the moment with how I respond to emotion, but some of what I’m feeling now is deep, raw, repressed emotion.
I’ve been dropping into a kind of meditation where I just allow it — massive sensations, buzzing, tears moving through my body. I’ve learned to sit, allow and observe.
Before, whenever tension arose, I would tense against it, go into fear, distract myself or do something else. Now I’m sitting with it and feeling it — it’s like a life force that wants to move. The fearful thoughts still come, but I can see them as an ego narrative, not the truth.
It feels raw and visceral. I’m not forcing it. I’m just letting it be there. I must have been tensed from the neck down for most of my life.”
We often imagine that if we “do the work” properly, we’ll end up feeling less. Calmer, flatter, more in control.
In practice, when things begin to shift, what usually shows up is more. More feeling, more nuance, more aliveness. The difference is that you’re not fighting yourself in the same way. The nervous system isn’t working quite so hard to hold everything in.
Emotion stops being “evidence that something is wrong with me” and starts to reveal itself as energy and information that were never fully allowed.
It can be intense. And at the same time, there’s often a quiet sense of, “Ah… this is what was here all along.”
“I slip back into my old self around others”
The first client also said:
“The one thing that bothers me is family and friends — I can easily slip back into my old self around them. But I feel that if I keep changing how I experience the world, it’s only a matter of time and exposure before that shifts too.”
This is a really important piece.
Our nervous systems don’t just learn what we feel. They learn who we have to be with particular people to stay safe, accepted, or invisible.
So you can feel quite different in yourself, and yet:
- around some people you find yourself shrinking
- around others you numb out or go back into performance mode
- old roles and patterns come back online very quickly
That doesn’t mean your progress is fragile or fake. It simply means your system is still updating its map of what’s possible in those relationships.
And that map does update – slowly and a little unevenly – as you keep:
- coming back to your body in familiar situations
- acknowledging what you actually feel (rather than what you “should” feel)
- letting a bit more of your real, present-time self leak through, rather than waiting until you feel “fully sorted”
This is what genuine transformation tends to look like. Not a clean before/after, but a living system discovering, “It’s OK for me to be more of who I am here too.”
If this feels uncomfortably familiar
If you recognise yourself in any of this — you think a lot, you understand a lot, you’re effective on the surface, but inside you feel tight, over-managed, or strangely absent — this is the territory I live in with clients.
We don’t spend our time chasing the next insight.
We work with:
- how your nervous system is organising your experience
- how your mind is trying (very intelligently) to keep you safe, and how that keeps you looping
- how to move from neck-up survival to a more embodied, authentic way of being in the world
If something here has landed, you’re very welcome to hit reply and tell me which line or quote spoke to you.
And if you’re curious about going deeper, we can set up a conversation and explore whether this kind of inside-out work is right for you.
For today, you might simply notice:
Are you mostly in the commentary – or in the actual experience of your life?
Warmly,
Kyle